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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



ORATION 



DELIVERED BY 



GEOEGE E. HOAE, 



OW MIA-SS^CHTISEITTS, 



APRIL 7, 1888, 



THE CELEBRATION OF THE CENTENNIAL 



FOUNDING OF THE NORTHWEST 



MARIETTA, OHIO. 



WASHINGTON, D. C. : 

JUDD * DETWEILER, PRINTERS. 

1888. 



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ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAE. 



There are doubtless many persons in this audience who 
have gathered here as to their Father's house. They salute 
their Mother on her birthday with the prayer and the con- 
fident hope that the life which now completes its first century 
may be immortal as liberty. If we were here only to do 
honor to Marietta — to celebrate the planting of this famous 
town, coeval with the Republic, seated by the beautiful river, 
her annals crowded with memories of illustrious soldiers 
and statesmen — this assemblage would be well justified and 
accounted for. 

But there is far more than this in the occasion. The 
states which compose what was once the Northwest Territory 
may properly look upon this as their birthday rather than 
that on which they were admitted into the Union. The 
company who came to Marietta with Rufus Putnam April 7, 
1788, came to found, not one state, but five, whose institu- 
tions they demanded should be settled before they started by 
an irrevocable compact. These five children, born of a great 
parentage and in a great time, are, as we count the life of 
nations, still in earliest youth. Yet they already contain 
within themselves all the resources of a great empire. Here 
is the stimulant climate of the temperate zone, where brain 
and body are at their best. Here will be a population of 
more than fifteen millions at the next census. Here is an 
area about equal to that of the Austrian Empire, and larger 
than that of any other country in Europe except Russia. 
Here is a wealth more than three times that of any country 
on this continent except the Republic of which they are a 
part — a wealth a thousand times that of Massachusetts, in- 
cluding Maine, a hundred years ago; one-third larger than 
that of Spain; equal to that of Holland and Belgium and 



4 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

Denmark combined ; equal now, I suppose, to that of Italy ■ 
already half as great as that of the vast Empire of Russia', 
with its population of more than a hundred millions, whose 
possessions cover a sixth part of the habitable globe. ' Below 
the earth are exhaustless stores of iron, and coal, and salt, 
and copper. Above, field, and farm, and forest, can easily 
feed and clothe and shelter the entire population of Europe, 
with her sixty empires, kingdoms, and republics. 

The yearly product of the manufacture of these five states 
is estimated by' the best authorities at from twelve to fifteen 
hundred millions of dollars. Everything needed for a per- 
fect workshop in all the mechanic and manufacturing arts 
has nature fashioned and gathered here, within easy reach, 
as nowhere else on earth. These states had, in 1886, forty- 
one thousand eight hundred and ninety-three miles of rail- 
way ; equal, within two hundred miles, to that of Great 
Britain and France combined; nearly three times that of 
Austria or Russia, and about twice that of Germany. While 
mighty rivers and mightier lakes already bear along their 
borders a commerce rivaling that of the ports of the Old 
World, to fair cities and prosperous towns, each one of which 
has its own wonderful and fascinating story. And above all 
this, and better than all this, man, the noblest growth this 
soil supplies, descended of a great race, from which he has 
inherited the love of liberty, the sense of duty, the instinct 
of honor, is here to relate and celebrate his century of stain- 
less history. Whatever of these things nature has not given 
is to be traced directly to the institutions of civil and relig- 
ious liberty the wisdom of your fathers established ; above 
all, to the great Ordinance. As the great jurist and statesman 
of Ohio said more than fifty years ago : " The spirit of the 
Ordinance of 1787 pervades them all." Here was the first 
human government under which absolute civil and religious 
liberty has always prevailed. Here no witch was ever hanged 
or burned. No heretic was ever molested'. Here no slave 
was ever born or dwelt. When older states or nations, where 



ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. O 

the chains of human bondage have been broken, shall utter 
the proud boast, " With a great sum obtained I this freedom," 
each sister of this imperial group — Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, 
Illinois, Wisconsin — may lift her queenly head with the yet 
prouder answer " But I was free-born." 

They were destined, also, to determine the character and 
decide the fate of the great Republic of which they are a 
part, and, through that, of constitutional liberty on earth. 
In saying this I speak with careful consideration of the mean- 
ing of the words. I wish, above all things, on this occasion, 
to avoid extravagance. I hope that what is said here may 
bear the examination of students of history in this most 
skeptical and critical age, and may be recalled on this spot, 
without a blush, by those who shall come after us, for many 
a future centennial. 

There is no better instance than this of the effect of well- 
ordered liberty on the fortune of a people. Nature is no re- 
specter of persons in her bounty. The buried race who 
built yonder mound dwelt here for ages, under the same 
sky, on the bank of the same river, with the same climate 
and soil. We know not who they were. Their institutions 
and government, their arts and annals, have perished in a 
deeper oblivion than that which covers the builders of the 
Pyramids — which moved Sir Thomas Browne to his sub- 
limest utterance : " History sinketh beneath her cloud. The 
traveler, as he paceth amazedly through these deserts, asketh 
of her. Who builded them? and she mumbleth something, 
but what it is he heareth not." The Indian and the French- 
man dwelt here, but could not hold their place. The growth 
of city and town and country, the wealth of the soil and the 
mine, the commerce of lake and river, the happiness and 
virtue of the fireside, the culture of the college, the three 
million children at school, the statute book on whose page 
there is no shame, are due to the great and wise men who 
gave you, as your birthday gift, universal liberty, universal 
suffrage, equal rights, and inviolable faith. 



6 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

There is no obscurity in the date or in the transaction. 
History pours upon the event its blazing sunlight. We see 
it, in all its relations, more clearly than it was seen by those 
who took part in it ; more clearly than we behold the events 
of our own time. No passion disturbs our judgment, lead- 
ing us either to exaggerate or depreciate. There is room for 
no feeling in our bosoms to-day but an honorable pride in 
our ancestry and an honorable love of our country. " It is 
a tale brief and familiar to all ; for the examples by which 
you may still be happy are to be found, not abroad, men of 
Athens, but at home." 

History furnishes countless examples in every age of 
heroic achievement and of great enterprise in war and peace, 
wisely conducted to successful issue. But the events which 
men remember and celebrate, which become tlie household 
words and stirring memories of nations, the sacred Olym- 
piads by which time is measured, and from which eras take 
their date, are those which mark the great advances of Lib- 
erty on to new ground which she has held. Such, by unan- 
imous consent of the race to which we belong, are the enact- 
ment of Magna Charta, the compact on board the Mayflower, 
the Declaration of Independence, the adoption of the Con- 
stitution of the United States, and later, in our own day, the 
Proclamation of Emancipation. I believe the event which 
you celebrate is not behind any one of these, whether in good 
fortune as to time, in the character of the actors, in the wis- 
dom which guided them, or in the far-reaching beneficence 
of the result. 

I am speaking to men who know their own history. I 
can but repeat — we gather on such occasions but to repeat — 
familiar stories — 

" Our lips must tell them to our sons, 
And they again to theirs." 

You know better than I do the miracle of history which 
brought the founders of the Northwest to this spot at the 



ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 7 

precise time when alone they could bring with them the in- 
stitutions which moulded its destiny. A few years earlier 
or a few years later and the great Ordinance would have 
been impossible. 

Look for a moment at the forty-eight men who came here 
a hundred 3'ears ago to found the first American civil gov- 
ernment, whose jurisdiction did not touch tide-water. See 
what manner of men they were; in what school they had 
been trained; what traditions they had inherited. I think 
you must agree that of all the men who ever lived on earth 
fit to perform that "ancient, primitive, and heroical work," 
the founding of a state, they were the fittest. Puritanism, 
as a distinct, vital, and predominant power, endured less 
than a century in England. It appears early in the reign 
of Elizabeth, who came to the throne in 1558, and departs 
at the restoration of Charles II, in 1660. But in that brief 
time it was the preserver, and may almost be called the cre- 
ator, of English freedom. The Puritans created the modern 
English House of Commons. That House, when they took 
their seats in it, was the feeble and timid instrument of des- 
potism. When they left it, it was what it has ever since 
been, the strongest, freest, most venerable legislative body the 
world had ever seen. When they took their seats in it, it 
was little more than the register of the King's command. 
When they left it, it was the main depository of the national 
dignity and the national will. King, and minister, and pre- 
late, who stood in their way, they brought to the bar and 
to the block. In that brief but crowded century they had 
made the name of Englishman the highest title of honor 
upon earth. A great historian has said "the dread of their 
invincible army was on all the inhabitants of the Island." 
He might have added, the dread of their invincible leader 
was on all the inhabitants of Europe. 

Puritanism had not spent itself as a force in England 
when it crossed the sea with Bradford and Winthrop. What 
a genius for creating the institutions of liberty and laying 



O ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

deep the foundations of order was in that handful of men 
who ahnost at the same instant framed the first written con- 
stitution that ever existed, and devised the New England 
town, that unmatched mechanism of local self-government, 
which has survived every dynasty in Europe and existed 
for two centuries and a half almost without a change. 

The forty-one men who landed from the Mayflower at 
Plymouth and the forty-eight men who came down the Ohio 
in the Mayflower to Marietta were of the same race and the 
same faith. It was one hundred and sixty-eight years from 
the planting of the Puritan Commonwealth to the founding 
of the great Northwest, destined so soon to become, and, as 
it seems, forever to remain, the seat and center of empire on 
this continent. But in the meantime that faith had been 
broadened, and softened, and liberalized. The training of 
the r^ce in that mighty gymnasium had changed the spirit 
of English Puritanism into the spirit of American liberty. 

To Americans there is no more delightful and instructive 
study than to trace the hand of a divine Providence in that 
agelong development of the capacity to take their full and 
leading part in the achievement of independence, in build- 
ing the states, in laying the foundation of empire in the 
little English sect, contending at first only for bare tolera- 
tion. See how the Power which planted the coal, whose 
subtle chemistry gets ready the iron for the use of the new 
race, which dismisses the star on its pathway through the 
skies, promising that in a thousand years it shall return 
again true to its hour, and keeps his word, gets his children 
ready that they shall not fail in the appointed time for the 
fulfillment of his high design. 

First. The history of the men who founded Ohio and of 
their ancestors since they landed at Plymouth and Salem 
was essentially a military history. It was a training which 
developed, more than any other, the best qualit}' of the in- 
dividual soldier, whether for command or for service. There 
never was West Point education like that of this military 



ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

school. Lord Chatham declared to the House of Lords in 
1777 ; "America has carried you through four wars, and will 
now carry you to your death. I venture to tell your Lord- 
ships that the American gentry will make officers fit to com- 
mand the troops of all the European powers." 

To many of them it was a life under arms. Every boy 
was a sharp-shooter. The Lidian wars, where, as Fisher 
Ames said, heroes are not celebrated, but are formed ; the . 
great struggle with France, from whose glory and victory 
your fathers were never absent, of which a continent was 
the prize; the great wars of William and Mary and of Queen 
Anne; Fort Edward ; William Henry; Crown Point; Mar- 
tinique ; the Havana ; twice-captured Louisburg, which they 
took the second time with its own cannon ; Quebec, where 
they heard the shout of triumph which filled the dying ear 
of Wolfe, and where at last the lilies went down before the 
lion, never again, but for a brief period in Louisiana, to 
float as an emblem of dominion over any part of the Ameri- 
can continent — these were the school-rooms of their dis- 
cipline. Whatever share others may have taken, the glory 
of that contest is your fathers' glory ; that victory is your 
fathers' victory. Then came twelve years of hollow and 
treacherous truce, and then — the Revolution. 

Second, It was not to the school of war alone that God 
put these his master-builders of States. For a century and a 
half every man played his part where the most important 
functions were those managed most directly by the people 
under a .system which, in all domestic affairs, was self-gov- 
ernment in everything but name. They introduced all the 
great social changes which prepared the way for the Repub- 
lic and made it inevitable. As has already been said, they 
adopted the first written social compact and devised the town 
system. They also abolished primogeniture, which act, Mr. 
Webster declared, " fixed the future frame and form of their 
government." De Tocqueville says: "The law of descent 



10 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

was the last step to equality. When the legislator has regu- 
lated the law of inheritance he may rest from his labor. 
The machine once put in motion will go on for ages and ad- 
vance, as if self-guided, toward a given point." They estab- 
lished universal education. They incorporated into their 
state the ancient customs of Kent, by virtue of which every 
child was born free and the power asserted to devise estates 
free from all feudal burdens. They also abolished entails. 

Third. During this whole time the resources of a skillful 
statesmanship were taxed to the utmost to maintain their 
free institutions against the power of England, where every 
dynasty in turn — Stuart, Cromwell, Hanover — looked jeal- 
ously upon the infant Commonwealths. The Massachusetts 
charter conferred upon the colony the power only of making 
laws not repugnant to the laws of England, and reserved a 
veto to the crown. The Puritan magistrates shrewdly resisted 
the desire of their people for a code and contrived that these 
great changes should, as far as might be, be introduced as 
customs, so as not to be submitted to the authorities in Eng- 
land. The Massachusetts Body of Liberties was sent about 
from town to town in manuscript, and was never printed 
until 1843. There was never a time when the mighty power 
of England was not a menace to our ancestors, from the first 
settlement throughout the whole of that long strife which 
did not really come to an end until Jay's treaty and An- 
thony Wayne's victory on the Maumee in 1794. 

Fourth. They had a religious belief which held that the 
law of God was the supreme practical rule in the conduct of 
States. However narrow and bigoted at times in its appli- 
cation, we find throughout their history a conscientious and 
reverent endeavor to govern their Commonwealth by this 
rule. Thus the theological discussions in which they de- 
lighted, the constant consideration of the relation of man to 
his Creator and to the supreme law of duty, became blended 
with that of their natural rights and their rights under the 
charter and the British constitution and of the true boundary 



ORATION OF GEORGE P. HOAR. 11 

which separates liberty and authority in the State. So, when 
the time for Independence came, they had decided the Revo- 
lution in their great debate before a gun was fired. It is 
said the cannon of the Union armies in the late war were 
shotted with the reply to Hayne. The ammanition of the 
Continental soldiery in their earlier war for freedom came 
from the discussion of the pulpit and the farmer's fireside. 
Fifth. There would have been at best but a provincial and 
narrow character had New England alone furnished the 
theater on which the scene was to be acted. The great drama 
of the Revolution brought her people under an influence to 
which they owe more than the}'^ have always acknowledged. 
I mean that of their allies and compatriots of the other colo- 
nies, who were their associates in that mighty struggle, es- 
pecially that of Virginia. John Jay and Alexander Ham- 
ilton, Benjamin Franklin and Gouverneur Morris, John 
Dickinson and Luther Martin were new and powerful teach- 
ers to the little communities, who, with every faculty of in- 
tellect and heart, were studying the fundamental principles 
of political science under Otis and the Adamses. But there 
now rose upon their sky the great Virginia constellation. 
If Virginia were held to the Union by no other tie she is 
forever bound to it b}' tljat tie, ever strongest to a generous 
spirit, the benefits she has conferred upon it. We shall see 
how her example of self-denial made possible the event we 
celebrate, and how the wisdom of her statesmen gave the 
event its character of far-reaching and perpetual beneficence. 
The teachers of New England now brought their pupils from 
the school where they had so well learned the principles of 
natural right and civil liberty to the great university where 
they were to take their degree in the building of states and 
framing constitutions under Washington and Jeff"erson, and 
Patrick Henry and Madison, and the Lees and Marshall. 
Within twelve years before the settlement at Marietta eleven 
of the thirteen States formed their constitutions. The con- 



12 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

vention that framed the Constitution of the United States 
was in session when the Ordinance of 1787 was passed. 

Sixth. This is by no means all. There is something 
more than the love of liberty — something more than the 
habit of successful resistance to oppression and the courage 
and power to assert the rights of mankind — needed to fit 
men to construct great states on sure foundations. The 
generation which was on the stage when the Northwest was 
planted had received another lesson. They had been taught 
the necessity of strengthening their political institutions, so 
that they should afford due securit}^ for property and social 
order and enable government to exert promptly the power 
needed for its own protection, without which it cannot long 
endure. Shay's insurrection in Massachusetts in 1787 was 
inspired mainly by the desire to prevent the enforcement 
of debts by the courts. To it was doubtless due the clause 
in the Ordinance of 1787 — inserted also in the Constitution — 
forbidding the passage of any law impairing the obligation 
of contracts. The disrespect with which the Continental Con- 
gress is sometimes spoken of is most unjust. Its want of vigor 
was due to the limitation put upon its powers by the States, 
and to no want of wisdom or energy in its members. That 
body will ever hold a great place in history — if it had done 
nothing else — which declared Independence, which called 
Washington to the chief command, which begun its labors 
with the great state papers which Chatham declared sur- 
passed the masterpieces of antiquity, and ended them with 
the Ordinance of 1787. But the States, jealous of all author- 
ity but their own, refused to confer on Congress the essential 
power of taxation and the means to enforce its own resolves. 
The effect of this short-sighted jealousy, in increasing and 
prolonging the burden of the war and in lowering the 
national character with foreign nations after it was over, 
the people had learned, to their great cost. 

From all this experience there had come to the men who 
were on the stage in this country in 1787 an aptness for tlie 



ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 13 

construction of constitutions and great permanent statutes 
such as the world never saw before or since. Their su- 
premacy in this respect is as unchallenged as that of the 
great authors of the reign of Elizabeth in the drama. 

Governor Stoughton said in 1668 that " God sifted a whole 
nation that he might send choice grain over into this wilder- 
ness." The quality of the grain continued to improve under 
his care. Never did the great Husbandman choose his seed 
more carefull}'^ than when he planted Ohio. I do not be- 
lieve the same number of persons fitted for the highest duties 
and responsibilities of war and peace could ever have been 
found in a community of the same size as were among the 
men who founded Marietta in the spring of 1788, or who 
joined them within twelve months thereafter. " Many of 
our associates," said Varnum, on the first 4th of July, " are 
distinguished for wealth, education, and virtue ; and others, 
for the most part, are reputable, industrious, well-informed 
planters, farmers, tradesmen, and mechanics." " No colony 
in America," said Washington, " was ever settled under such 
favorable auspices as that which has just commenced at the 
Muskingum. Information, property, and strength will be 
its characteristics. I know many of the settlers personally, 
and there never were men better calculated to promote the 
welfare of such a community." "The best men in Con- 
necticut and Massachusetts," writes Carrington to James 
Monroe, " a description of men who will fix the character 
and politics throughout the whole territory, and which will 
probably endure to the latest period of time." " I know 
them all," cried Lafayette, when the list of nearly fifty mili- 
tar}'' officers, who were among the pioneers, was read to him 
in Marietta, in 1825, the tender memories of forty years 
thronging his aged bosom — " I know them all. I saw them 
at Brandy wine, Yorktown, and Rhode Island. They were 
the bravest of the brave." Washington and Varnum, as 
well as Carrington and Lafayette, dwell chiefly, as was 
W^ashington's fashion, upon the personal quality of the 



14 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

men and not upon their public offices or titles. Indeed, to 
be named with such commendation, upon personal knowl- 
edge, by the cautious and conscientious Washington, was to 
a veteran soldier better than being knighted on the field of 
battle. They were the very best specimens of the New Eng- 
land character that could be found. They were among the 
most steadfast, constant, liberty-loving men that ever lived. 
Self-government had become to them a prime necessity of 
life ; but it was that self-government, the sublimest thing in 
the universe except its Creator, b}^ which a human will gov- 
erns itself in obedience to a law higher than its own desire. 
They were men of a very sincere and simple religious faith. 
The belief in a personal immortality, that hope's perpetual 
breath, without which no gift of noblest origin ever cometh 
to man or nation, was to them a living reality. The scene 
which Burns describes in the Cottar's Saturday Night, from 
which he says, " Old Scotia's grandeur springs," was of 
nightly occurrence in the cabins of these soldiers and 
Indian-fighters. 

The little company contained many military officers of 
high rank, men who had performed important exploits in 
war, friends and associates of Washington and Lafayette, 
and statesmen who had been leaders of the people in tlie 
days before the Revolution. If that assembly had been 
called, in the Providence of God, to assert the rights of Eng- 
lishmen, as did the barons of Magna Charta ; or to make an 
original social compact, as did the men on board the May- 
flower; or to found towns and create a body of liberties and 
customs, as did the men of from 1620 to 1650 ; or to state the 
case between the fundamental rights of human nature and 
King George, as did the men of the Declaration in 1776 ; or 
to conduct and lead and plan a great defensive war, or to 
fashion a constitution for state or nation, they would have 
been equal to the task. 

There are many names that rise to the lips to-day. The 
settlers are not here. But their cliildren are here. The 



ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 15 

men who knew them, or who have heard their story from the 
lips of fathers and mothers who knew them, are here. Your 
hearts are full of their memories. The stately figures of 
illustrious warriors and statesmen, the forms of sweet and 
comely matrons, living and real as if you had seen them 
yesterday, rise before you now. Varnum, than whom a 
courtlier figure never entered the presence of a Queen — sol- 
dier, statesman, scholar, orator, — whom Thomas Paine, no 
mean judge, who had heard the greatest English orators in 
the greatest days of English eloquence, declared the most 
eloquent man he had ever heard speak ; Whipple, gallant 
seaman as ever trod a deck, — a man whom Farragut or Nel- 
son would have loved as a brother ; first of the glorious pro- 
cession of American naval heroes ; first to fire an American 
gun at the flag of England on the sea; first to unfurl the 
flag of his own country on the Thames ; first pioneer of the 
river commerce of the Ohio to the Gulf; Meigs, hero of Sagg 
Harbor, of the march to Quebec, of the storming of Stony 
Point, — thaChristian gentleman and soldier, whom the Cher- 
okees named the White Path in token of the unfailing kind- 
ness and inflexible faith which had conveyed to their dark- 
ened minds some not inadequate conception of the spirit of 
Him who is the Way, the Truth, and theLife; Parsons, soldier, 
scholar, judge, one of the strongest arms on which Washing- 
ton leaned, who first suggested the Continental Congress, 
from the story of whose life could almost be written the his- 
tory of the Northern war ; the chivalric and ingenious Devol, 
said by his biographer to be "the most perfect figure of a 
man to be seen amongst a thousand;" the noble presence 
of Sproat ; the sons of Israel Putnam and Manasseh Cutler ; 
Fearing, and Greene, and Goodale, and the Gilmans ; Tupper, 
leader in church and state, — the veteran of a hundred ex- 
ploits, who seems, in the qualities of intellect and heart, like 
a twin brother of Kufus Putnam ; the brave and patriotic, 
but unfortunate St. Clair, first Governor of the Northwest, 
president of the Continental Congress; — the mighty shades 



16 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

of these heroes and their companions pass before our eyes, 
beneath the primeval forest, as the shades of the Homeric 
heroes before Ulysses in the Land of Asphodel. But no fable 
mingles with their story. No mythical legend of encounter 
with monster or dragon or heathen god exaggerates their 
heroism. There is no tale of she-wolf nurse, whose milk 
blended with the blood of their leader. The foe whose 
war-whoop woke the sleep of the cradle on the banks of the 
Muskingum needed no epic poet to add to his terrors. The 
she-wolf that mingled in your fathers' life was a very real 
animal. These men are in the full light of history. We 
can measure them, their strength and their weakness, with 
the precision of mathematics. They are the high-water^ 
mark of the American character thus far. Let their de- 
scendants give themselves up to the spirit of this great 
patriotic occasion and to the contemplation of their virtues, 
to form a reservoir of heroic thought and purpose to be 
ready when occasion comes. 

It is said the founders were deceived and did not select 
the best place for their settlement. But it seemed a paradise 
to men from New England. Drowne, in the first anniversary 
oration, on the 7th of April, the day which the founders re- 
solved should be " forever observed as a day of public festival 
in the territory of the Ohio Company," declared that " then 
this virgin soil received 3''ou first, alluring from your native 
homes by charms substantial and inestimable; 

"A wilderness of sweets ; for Nature here 
"Wantoned as in her prime, and played at will 
Her virgin fancies, pouring forth more sweet, 
Wild above rule or art ; the gentle gales 
Fanning their odoriferous wings, dispense 
Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole 
Those bulmj' spoils." 

The exuberant eloquence of Varnum also ftiiled him. He, 
too, could find nothing less than Milton's picture of Eden to 
express his transports. 



ORATION OF GEORGE P. HOAR. 17 

As I have read the story of these brave men — of some of 
them for the first time — in the sober pages of Hildreth, the 
historian of the Pioneers, I could not help applying to Ohio 
the proud boast of Pericles concerning Athens : " Athens 
alone among her cotomporaries is superior to the report of 
her. Of how few Hellenes can it be said, as of them, that 
their deeds, when weighed in the balance, have been found 
equal to their fame." 

But wliat can be said which shall be adequate to the worth 
of him who was the originator, inspirer, leader, and guide of 
the Ohio settlement from the time when he first conceived it 
in the closing days of the Revolution until Ohio took her place 
in the Union as a free State, in the summer of 1803 ? Every 
one of that honorable company would have felt it as a per- 
sonal wrong had he been told that the foremost honors of this 
oojasion would not be given to Rufus Putnam. Lossing calls 
him "the Father of Ohio." "Burnet says "he was regarded as 
their principal chief and leader." He was chosen the super- 
intendent at the meeting of the Ohio Company, in Boston, 
Noveraber21, 1787, "to be obeyed and respected accordingly." 
The agents of the Compan^'^, when they voted in 1789 "that 
the 7th of April be forever observed as a public festival," 
speak of it as "the day when General Putnam commenced 
the settlement in this country." Harris dedicates the docu- 
ments collected in his appendix to Rufus Putnam, " the 
founder and father of the State." He was a man after Wash- 
ington's own pattern and after Washington's own heart; of 
the blood and near kindred of Israel Putnam, the man who 
" dared to lead where any man dared to follow." He was 
born in Sutton, Massachusetts, April 9, 1730. Like so many 
of the ablest men of his time, he was his own teacher. His 
passion for knowledge, especially mathematics and engineer- 
ing, overcame the obstacle of early poverty. He was a veteran 
of the old French war, where his adventures sound like one of 
Cooper's romances. He was made Lieutenant-Colonel of a 
Worcester county regiment at the outbreak of the Revolution 
3 



18 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

and joined the camp at Cambridge just after the battle of Lex- 
ington. His genius as an engineer was soon disclosed. He 
was, as Washington expressly and repeatedly certified, the 
ablest engineer officer of the war, whether American or 
Frenchman. He was soon called by a council of generals 
and field officers to direct the construction of a large part of 
the works on which the position of the army besieging Bos- 
ton depended. He told Washington he had never read a 
word on that branch of science. But the chieftain would 
take no denial. He performed his task to the entire satis- 
faction of his commander, and was soon ordered to super- 
intend the defenses of Providence and Newport. 

One evening in the winter of 1776 Putnam was invited to 
dine at headquarters. Washington detained him after the 
company had departed to consult him about an attack on 
Boston. The general preferred an entrenchment on Dor- 
chester Heights, which would compel Howe to attack him 
and risk another Bunker Hill engagement with a different 
result, to marching his own troops over the ice to storm the 
town. But the ground was frozen to a great depth and re- 
sisted the pick-axe like solid rock. Putnam was ordered to 
consider the matter, and if he could find any wa}^ to execute 
Washington's plan to report at once. He himself best tells 
the story of the accident — we may almost say the miracle — 
by which the deliverance of Massachusetts from the foreign 
invader, a veteran British army eleven thousand strong, 
was wrought by the instrumentality of the millwright's ap- 
prentice : 

"I left headquarters in company with another gentleman, 
and on our way came by General Heath's. I had no thoughts 
of calling until I came against his door, and then I said, 
' Let us call on General Heath,' to which he agreed. I had 
no other motive but to pay my respects to the general. 
While there, I cast my eye on a book which lay on the table, 
lettered on the back ' Muller's Field Engineer.' I imme- 
diately requested the general to lend it to me. He denied 



ORATION OF GEORGE P. HOAR. 19 

me. 1 repeated ray request. He again refused, and told me 
lie never lent his books. I then told him that he must rec- 
ollect that he was one who, at Roxbury, in a measure com- 
pelled me to undertake a business which, at the time, I con- 
fessed I never had read a word about, and that he must let 
me have the book. After some more excuses on his part and 
olose pressing on mine I obtained the loan of it." 

In looking at the table of contents his eye was caught by 
the word "chandelier," a new word to him. He read care- 
fully the "description and soon had his plan ready. The 
chandeliers were made of stout timbers, ten feet long, into 
which were framed posts five feet high and five feet apart, 
placed on the ground in parallel lines and the open spaces 
filled in with bundles of fascines, strongly picketed together, 
thus forming a movable parapet of wood instead of earth, as 
heretofore done. The men were immediately set to work in 
the adjacent apple orchard and woodlands cutting and 
bundling up the fascines and carrying them with the chan- 
deliers on to the ground selected for the work. They were 
put in their place in a single night. 

When the sun went down on Boston on the 4th of March 
Washington was at Cambridge, and Dorchester Heights as 
nature or the husbandman had left them in the autumn. 
When Sir William Howe rubbed his eyes on the morning 
of the 5th he saw through the heavy mist the entrench- 
ments, on which, he said, the rebels had done more work in 
a night than his whole army would have done in a month. 
He wrote to Lord Dartmouth that it must have been the 
employment of at least twelve thousand men. His own 
effective force, including seamen, was but about eleven 
thousand. Washington had but fourteen thousand fit for 
duty. " Some of our officers," said the Annual Register — 
I suppose Edmund Burke was the writer — "acknowledged 
that the expedition with which these works were thrown up, 
with their sudden and unexpected appearance, recalled to 
their minds the wonderful stories of enchantment and in- 



20 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

visible agency which are so frequent in the Eastern Ro- 
mances." Howe was a man of spirit. He took the prompt 
resolution to attempt to dislodge the Americans the next 
night before their works were made impregnable. Earl Percy, 
who had learned something of Yankee quality at Bunker 
Hill and Lexington, was to command the assault. But the 
Power that dispersed the Armada baflied all the plans of the 
British general. Tiiere came " a dreadful storm at night," 
which made it impossible to cross the bay until the Ameri- 
can works were perfected. 

We take no leaf from the pure chaplet of Washington's 
fame when we say that the success of the first great military 
operation of the Revolution was due to Rufus Putnam. The 
Americans, under Israel Putnam, marched into Boston, 
drums beating and colors flying. The veteran British array, 
aided by a strong naval force, soldier and sailor, English- 
man an-d Tory, sick and well, bag and baggage, got out of 
.Boston before the strategy of Washington, the engineering 
of Putnam, and the courage of the despised and untried 
^^eomen, from whose leaders they withheld the usual titles 
of military respect. " It resembled," said Burke, " more the 
emigration of a nation than the breaking up of a camp." 

But it is no part of our task to-day to narrate the military 
service of General Putnam, although that includes the for- 
tification of West Point, an important part in the capture of 
Burgoyne, and an able plan, made at the request of Wash- 
ington, for putting the army on a peace establishment and 
for a chain of fortified military posts along the entire fron- 
tier. We have to do only with the entrenchments con- 
structed under the command of this great engineer for the 
constitutional fortress of American libert3^ 

Putnam removed his family to Rutland, Worcester county, 
Massachusetts, early in 1870. His house is yet standing, 
about ten miles from the birth})lace of the grandfather of 
President Garfield. He returned himself to Rutland when 
the war was over. He had the noble public spirit of his 



ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 21 

day, to which no duty seemed trifling or obscure. For five 
years he tilled his farm and accepted and performed the 
public offices to which his neighbors called him. He was 
representative to the General Court, selectman, constable, 
tax collector, and committee to lay out school lots for the 
town; state surveyor, commissioner to treat with the Pe- 
nobscot Indians, and volunteer in putting down Shay's 
rebellion. He was one of the founders and first trustees 
of Leicester Academy and, with his family of eight children, 
gave from his modest means a hundred pounds toward' 
its endowment. , 

But he had larger plans in mind. The town constable 
of Rutland was planning an empire. His chief counsellor 
in his design was his old leader and friend, George Wash- 
ington. Washington had been interested in the settlement 
of the Northwest, and in connecting it with the Atlantic by 
land and water routes, almost from boyhood. His brothers, 
Lawrence and Augustine, were members of the first Ohio 
Company in 1748. He was himself a large land-owner 
on the Ohio and the Kanawha. 

Before the army broke up a petition of two hundred and 
eighty-eight officers, of which Putnam was the chief pro- 
moter, was sent by him to Wash-ington, to be forwarded to 
Congress, for a grant of lands north and northwest of the 
River Ohio to the veterans of the army in redemption of 
the pledges of Congress ; and. further, for sales to such offi- 
cers and soldiers as might choose to become purchasers on 
a system which would eff'ectually prevent the monopoly of 
large tracts. A year later Putnam renews his urgent appli- 
cation to Washington for aid in his project, to which he says 
he has given much time since he left the army. He asks 
the General to recommend to him some member of Congress 
with whom he can directly correspond, as he does not like 
even to liint these things to the delegates from Massachu- 
setts, though worth}'- men. She is forming plans to sell her 
eastern lands. Washington answers that he has exerted 



22 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

every power with Congress that he is master of, and had 
dwelt upon Putnam's argument for a speedy decision, but 
Congress adjourned without action. 

In 1785 Congress appointed General Putnam one of the 
surveyors of northwestern lands. He says, in his letter ac- 
cepting the office, that " a wish to promote emigration from 
among my friends into that country and not the wages stipu- 
lated is my principal motive." He was compelled by his 
engagements with Massachusetts to devolve the duty upon 
General Tupper as a substitute. Tupper could not get below 
Pittsburgh in the season of 1785. He came back to Massa- 
chusetts in the winter with such knowledge of the country 
as he had gained, and reported to Putnam at Rutland on 
the 9th of January, 1786. The two veterans sat up together 
all night. At day-break they had completed a call for a 
convention to form a company. It was to all officers and 
soldiers of the late war and all other good citizens residing 
in Massachusetts who might wish to become purchasers of 
lands in the Ohio country. It was to extend afterward to 
the inhabitants of other States "as might be agreed on." 
The convention was held at the Bunch of Grapes, in Boston, 
March 1, 1786; chose a committee, of which Putnam was 
chairman, to draft a plan ^or their organization, and so the 
Ohio Company was begun. The year was spent in obtain- 
ing the names of the associates. They were men of prop- 
erty and character, carefully selected, who meant to become 
actual residents in the new country. They were men to 
wliora the education, religion, freedom, private and public 
faith which they incorporated in the fundamental compact 
of Ohio were the primal necessaries of life. In 1787 the 
directors appointed Putnam superintendent of all their affairs. 
In the winter everything was ready. Putnam went out from 
his simple house in Rutland to dwell no more in his native 
Massachusetts. It is a plain wooden dwelling, perhaps a 
little better than the average of the farmer's houses of New 
England of that da3\ Yet about which of Europe's palaces 



ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 23 

do holier memories cliug? Honor, and Fame, and Freedom, 
and Empire, and the Fate of America went with him as he 
crossed the threshold. The rest of his life is, in large part, 
the history of Marietta and of Ohio for more than thirty 
years. " The impress of his character," says his biographer, 
" is strong!}' marked on the population of Marietta, on their 
buildings, institutions, and manners." 

The wise and brave men who settled Marietta would have 
left an enduring «mark, under whatever circumstances, on 
any community to which they had belonged. But their 
colony was founded at the precise and only time when they 
could have secured the constitution which has given the 
Northwest its character and enabled it, at last, to establish 
in the whole country the principles of freedom which in- 
spired alike the company of the first and second Mayflower. 
The glory of the Northwest is the Ordinance of 1787. What 
share of that glory belongs to the men who founded the 
Northwest ? Were your fathers the architects and designers, 
as well as the builders, of their state? Was the constitu- 
tional liberty, which they enjoyed themselves and left to 
their children, their own conception and aspiration or was 
it conferred by the Continental Congress ? 

"A gift of that which is not to be given, 
By all the blended powers of earth and Heaven." 

What was it that applied the spur to the halting Congress 
whose inaction the whole power of Washington had failed 
to overcome? The researches of historical scholars have, 
within a few years, opened to us for the first time this most 
interesting chapter of American history. 

The firmness and foresight of Maryland forbade her dele- 
gates to ratify the articles of confederation until the claims 
of individual states to the lands north and west of the Ohio 
River were abandoned for the common benefit. New York 
set the example. The cession of Virginia was the most 
marked instance of a large and generous self-denial. It not 



24 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

only gave to the United States a resource for a large pay- 
ment on the public debt and a large provision for veteran 
soldiers, but gave the country its first strictly common and 
national interest and the first subject for the exercise of an 
authority wholly national. 

The necessity was felt for an earl}' provision for a survey 
and sale of the territory and for the government of the politi- 
cal bodies to be established there. These two subjects were, 
in the main, kept distinct. Various plans were reported 
from time to time. Ten committees were appointed on the 
frame of government and three on the schemes- for survey 
and sale. Fourteen different reports were made at different 
times; but from September 6, 1780, when the resolution 
passed asking the states to cede their lands, until July G, 
1787, when Manasseh Cutler, the envoy of the Ohio Com- 
pany, came to the door, every plan adopted and every plan 
proposed, except a motion of Rufus King, which he himself 
abandoned, we now see would have been fraught with mis- 
chief if it had become and continued law. 

March 1, 1784, the day A^irginia's deed of cession was de- 
livered, Jefferson reported from a committee of which he was 
chairman an ordinance which divided the territory into ten 
states, each to be admitted into the Union when its popula- 
tion equaled that of the smallest existiug state. He thought, 
as he declared to Monroe, that if great states were established 
beyond the mountains they would separate themselves from 
the confederacy and become its enemies. His ordinance, 
when reported, contained a provision excluding slavery after 
1800. This was stricken out by the Congress. It is mani- 
fest, from subsequent events that, under it, the territory 
would have been occupied by settlers from the South, with 
their slaves. It would have been impossible to exclude tlie 
institution of slavery if it had once got footing. With or 
without his proviso, the scheme of Mr. Jefferson would have 
resulted in dividing the territory into ten small slave-hold- 
ing states. They would have come into the Union with 



ORATION OF OEORGE F. HOAR. 25 

their twenty votes in the Senate. Their weight would have 
inclined the scale irresistibly. The American Union would 
have been a great slave-holding empire. This proposal, so 
amended, became law April 23,1784, and continued in force 
until repealed by the Ordinance of 1787.. It contained no 
republican security except a provision that the government 
of the states should be republican. 

March 16, 1785, Rufus King, at the suggestion of Timothy 
Pickering, offered a resolve that there should be no slavery 
in any of the states described in the resolve of 1784. This 
was sent to a committee of which he was chairman. He re- 
ported it back, so amended as to conform to Jefferson's plan 
for postponing the prohibition of slavery until after 1800, 
and with a clause providing for the surrender of fugitive 
slaves ; but it was never acted on. 

May 7, 1784, Jefferson reported an ordinance for ascer- 
taining the mode of locating and disposing of the public 
lands. This was recommitted, amended, and finally adopted. 
Congress rejected the proposition to reserve lands for re- 
ligious purposes, but retained a provision for schools. It 
contained also a clause that the lauds should pass in descent 
and dower, according to the custom of gavelkind, until the 
temporary government was established. 

In 1786 a new committee was raised to report a new plan 
for the government of the territory. This committee made 
a report which provided that no state should be admitted 
from the Western territory until it had a population equal to 
one-thirteenth of the population of the original states at the 
preceding census. This would have kept out Ohio till 1820, 
Indiana till 1850, Illinois till 1860, Michigan till 1880, and 
Wisconsin till after 1890. The Seventh Congress expired 
while this report was pending. It was revived in the eighth. 
The clause which would have so long postponed the ad- 
mission of the states was probably stricken out, though this 
is not quite certain. But there was little' of value in the 
whole scheme. It contained no barrier against slavery. 
4 



26 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

This was the state of things when Manasseh Cutler came 
into the chamber on the morning of July 6, 1787, bearing 
with him the fate of the Northwest. He had left Boston on 
the evening of June 25, where on that day he records in his 
diary — 

"I conversed with General Putnam, and settled the prin- 
ciples on which I am to contract with Congress for lands 
on account of the Ohio Company." 

He was probably the fittest man on the Continent, except 
Franklin, for a mission of delicate diplomacy. It was said 
just now that Putnam was a man after Washington's pat- 
tern and after Washington's own heart. Cutler was a man 
after Franklin's pattern and after Franklin's own heart. He 
was the most learned naturalist in America, as Franklin 
was the greatest master in physical science. He was a man 
of consummate prudence in speech and conduct; of courtly 
manners ; a favorite in the drawing-room and in the camp; 
with a wide circle of friends and correspondents among the 
most famous men of his time. During his brief service in 
Congress he made a speech on the judicial system, in 1803, 
which shows his profound mastery of constitutional prin- 
ciples. 

It now fell to his lot to conduct a negotiation second only 
in importance in the history of his country to that which 
Franklin conducted with France in 1778. Never was am- 
bassador crowned with success more rapid or more complete. 

On the 9th of July the pending ordinance was committed 
to a new committee — 

Edward Carrington, of Virginia ; 

Nathan Dane, of Massachusetts ; 

Richard Henry Lee, of Virginia ; 

John Kean, of South Carolina ; 

Melancthon Smith, of New York. 

The}^ sent a copy of the ordinance which had come over 
from the last Congress to Dr. Cutler, that he might make 



ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 27 

remarks and prepare amendments. He returned the ordi- 
nance, with his remarks and amendments, on the 10th. The 
ordinance was newly modeled and all Cutler's amendments 
inserted, except one relating to taxation, "and that," he 
says, " was better qualified." It was reported to Congress on 
the 1 1th. The clause prohibiting slavery, which had not been 
included because Mr. Dane " had no idea the States would 
agree to it," was, on Dane's motion, inserted as an amend- 
ment, and on the 13th the greatest and most important legis- 
lative act in American history passed unanimously, save a 
single vote. But one day intervened between the day of the 
appointment of the committee and that of their report. Cut- 
ler returned the copy of the old ordinance with his proposed 
amendments on one day. The next, the committee reported 
the finished plan. But two days more elapsed before its final 
passage. 

The measure providing for the terms of the sale to the 
Ohio Company was passed on the 27th of the same July. 
Cutler was master of the situation during the whole nego- 
tiation. When some of his conditions were rejected he "paid 
his respects to all the members of Congress in the city, and 
informed them of his intention to depart that day, and, if 
his terms were not acceded to, to turn his attention to some 
other part of the country." They urged him "to tarry till 
the next day and they would put by all other business to 
complete the contract." He records in his diary that Con- 
gress " came to the terms stated in our letter without the 
least variation." 

From this narrative I think it must be clear that the plan 
which Rufus Putnam and Manasseh Cutler settled in Boston 
was the substance of the Ordinance of 1787. I do not mean 
to imply that the detail or the language of the great statute 
was theirs. But I cannot doubt that they demanded a con- 
stitution, with its unassailable guaranties for civil liberty, 
such as Massachusetts had enjoyed since 1780 and such as 
Virginia had enjoyed since 1776, instead of the meagre pro- 



28 ORATIOX OF GEORGE F. IIOAB. 

vision for a government to be changed at the will of Congress 
or of temporary popular majorities, which was all Congress 
had hitherto proposed, and this constitution secured by an 
irrevocable compact, and that this demand was an inflex- 
ible condition of their dealing with Congress at all. Cutler, 
with consummate wisdom, addressed himself, on his arrival, 
to the representatives of A'^irginia. Jefferson had gone to 
France in July, 1784, but the weight of his great influence 
remained. King was in Philadelphia, where the Constitu- 
tional Convention was sitting. It was Carrington, of Vir- 
ginia, who brought Cutler onto the floor. Richard Henry 
Lee had voted against King's motion to commit his anti- 
slavery proviso, but the first mover of the Declaration of In- 
dependence needed little converting to cause him to favor 
anything that made for freedom. William Grayson, of Vir- 
ginia, early and late, earnestly supported the prohibition 
of slavery, and, when broken in health, he attended the Vir- 
ginia Legislature in 1788 to secure her consent to tlie depart- 
ure from the condition of her deed of cession, which the 
Ordinance of 1787 effected. Some of the amendments upon 
the original ordinance now preserved are in his handwriting. 
To Nathan Dane belongs the immortal honor of having 
been the draftsman of the statute and the mover of the 
anti-slavery amendment. His monument has been erected, 
in imperishable granite, by the greatest of American archi- 
tects among the massive columns of the great argument in 
reply to Hajaie. But the legislative leadership was Vir- 
ginia's. From her came th€ great weight of Washington, 
in whose heart the scheme of Rufus Putnam for the coloni- 
zation of the West occupied a place second only to that of the 
Union itself. Hers was the great influence of Jefferson, 
burning with the desire that his country in her first great 
act of national legislation should make the doctrines of the 
Declaration of Independence a reality. From her came Car- 
rington, chairman of the committee ; Lee, its foremost mem- 
ber; and Grayson, then in the chair of the Congress, who, Mr. 



ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 29 

Bancroft says, " gave, more than any other man in Con- 
gress, efficient attention to the territorial question, and 
whose record against slavery is clearer than that of any 
other Southern man who was present in 1787." 

And let us remember with gratitude, on this anniversary, 
that when, in 1824, the plan to call a convention in Illinois 
to sanction the establishment of slavery there was defeated 
by a majority of sixteen hundred votes, it was to Governor 
Edward Coles, a son of Virginia, the old friend of Jefferson 
and Madison, that the result was largely due ; and when, in 
1803, the convention of the Indiana Territory petitioned Con- 
gress for the repeal of the sixth clause of the Ordinance of 
1787, it was a Virginian voice, through the lips of John Ran- 
dolph, whose name and blood are so honorably represented 
here to-day, that denied the request. 

The Ohio Company might well dictate its own terras, 
even in dealing with the far-sighted statesmen of 1787. 
The purchase and settlement of this large body of the public 
lands removed from their minds several subjects of deepest 
anxiety. It afforded a provision for the veterans of the war. 
It extinguished a considerable portion of the public debt. 
It largely increased the value of the rest of the public do- 
main. It placed the shield of a settlement of veteran sol- 
diers between the frontiers of New York, Pennsylvania, and 
Virginia and the most dangerous and powerful Indian tribes 
on the Continent. It secured to American occupation a ter- 
ritory on which England, France, and Spain were still gazing 
with eager and longing eyes — in which England, in viola- 
tion of treaty obligation, still held on to her military posts, 
hoping that the feeble band of our Union would break in 
pieces. It removed a fear, never absent from the minds of 
the public men of that da}^ that the western settlers would 
form a new confederacy and seek an alliance with the power 
that held tlie outlet of the Mississippi. The strength of this 
last apprehension is shown in the confidential correspond- 
ence of Washington. He twice refers to it in his farewell 



30 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

address — once where he warns the West against " an apos- 
tate and unnatural connection with an}' foreign power," and 
again, where he urges them " henceforth to be deaf to those 
advisers, if such there are, who would sever them from their 
brethren and connect them with aliens." 

Congress had nowhere else to look for these vital advan- 
tages if the scheme of Putnam and his associates failed. 
They, on the other hand, would buy all the land they wanted 
of New York or Massachusetts on their own terms. It is no 
wonder, then, that the Congress which in seven years had 
got no further than the Jefferson statute of 1784, and which 
had struck out of it the anti-slavery proviso, came in four 
days to the adoption of the Ordinance of '87 with but one 
dissenting vote. 

It will not be expected that I should undertake, within 
the limits of this discourse, to dwell in detail upon the pro- 
visions of the Ordinance of 1787 and the benefit they have 
conferred upon the region over which they have extended. 
Known throughout this country wherever American history 
is known, wherever men value constitutional liberty, they 
are familiar as household words to the men who are assem- 
bled here. Tliey are, in some important respects, distin- 
guished above all the other great enactments which lie at 
the foundation of human societies. If there be anything 
for which Daniel Webster is distinguished among great 
orators, it is the discretion and moderation of his speech. 
He never sought to create an impression or give an emphasis 
by overstatement. It was well said of liim by another native 
of New England, whose fame as a great public teacher equals 
his own : " His weight was like the falling of a planet; his 
discretion, the return of its due and perfect curve." Mr. 
Webster declared, in a well-known passage : " We are ac- 
customed to praise the lawgivers of antiquity ; we help to 
perpetuate the fame of Solon and Lycurgus, but I doubt 
whether one single law of any lawgiver, ancient or modern, 



ORATION OF GEORGE P. HOAR. 31 

has produced effects of more distinct, marked, and lasting 
character than the Ordinance of 1787." 

The founders of the Northwest and the framers of the 
Ordinance meant to put its great securities be^'ond the reach 
of any fickleness or change in popular sentiment unless by 
a revolution which should upheave the foundations of social 
order itself They made the six articles "Articles of com- 
pact b-Ctween the original States and the people and States 
in the said Territory, to forever remain unalterable unless 
by common consent." They were to have the force which 
the philosophers of that day attributed to the original social 
compact, to which they ascribed the origin of all human 
society. Three parties, the original States, the new States, 
and the people, made the compact. This compact was to 
attend these communities forever, unalterable save by the 
consent of all three, under whatever new constitutional ar- 
rangements they might come. There is the highest con- 
temporary authority for the opinion that these articles would 
never be affected by ordinary constitutional changes in the 
States. " It fixed forever," said Mr. Webster, " the character 
of the population in the vast regions northwest of the Ohio 
by excluding from them involuntary servitude. It impressed 
on the soil itself, while it was yet a wilderness, an incapacity 
to sustain any other than freemen. It laid the interdict 
against personal servitude in original compact, not only 
deeper than all local law, but deeper, also, than all local 
constitutions." These great and perpetual blessings your 
fathers found awaiting them when they took possession of 
their new homes, beneficent as the sky, or the climate, or the 
soil, or the river, to endure so long as the sky shall send 
down its influence or the Ohio continue to flow. 

While a portion of the second article reaffirms the great 
securities which are of English origin, and are found in 
Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights, the larger part are 
originally and exclusively American. The student of con- 
stitutional law will find there all he will need for an ample 



'32 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

and complete understanding of the difference between the 
genius of the limited monarchism of England and the genius 
of American liberty. 

For the first time in history the Ordinance of 1787 ex- 
tended that domain from which all human government is 
absolutely excluded b}^ forbidding any law interfering with 
the obligation of good faith between man and man. This 
provision, adopted afterward in substance in the Constitu- 
tion of the United States, and thereby made binding as a 
restraint upon every state, is the security upon which rests 
at last all commerce, all trade, all safety in the dealings of 
men with each other. To-day its impregnable shield is over 
the dealing of sixty millions of people with each other and 
with mankind. 

I have described very imperfectly the education, extend- 
ing over two centuries, which fitted your fathers for the great 
drama to be enacted here. Equally wonderful is the series 
of events which kept the soil of the Ohio territory untouched 
until they were ready to occupy it. France, in 1755, re- 
jected an offer made her by England that England would 
give up all her claim west of a line from the mouth of French 
Creek twenty leagues up that stream toward Lake Erie and 
from the same point direct to the last mountains of Virginia 
which should descend toward the ocean. France was to re- 
tain Canada and her settlements on the Illinois and Wabash. 
If this offer had been accepted, the French, who always so 
skillfully managed the Indians, would have filled the terri- 
tory with their colonies, and, under whatever sovereignty it 
had ultimately come, would have impressed their character 
and institutions on it forever. King George, too, in 1763, at 
the close of the French war, forbade his governors in Amer- 
ica " to grant any warrants of survey or patents for any lands 
beyond the heads or sources of any of the rivers which fall 
into the Atlantic ocean from the west or northwest." This 
shut out the people of Virginia, with their slaves, from all 
the territory that now forms Ohio. 



ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 33 

Again, the controversies between the States as to title 
prevented its settlement during the Revolution. The fear 
of Indian hostilities prevented its settlement during the joe- 
riod Mr. Jefferson's ordinance of 1784 was in force. The 
votes of the Southern States defeated Mr. Jefferson's proviso, 
under which slavery would surely have gained a footi>ng, 
and so left the way open for the total exclusion of slavery 
three years later. 

We are not here to celebrate an accident. What occurred 
here was premeditated, designed, foreseen. If there be in 
the universe a power which ordains the course of history, 
we cannot fail to see in the settlement of Ohio an occasion 
when the human will was working in harmony with its 
own. The events move onward to a dramatic completeness. 
Rufus Putnam lived to see the little colony, for whose pro- 
tection against the savage he had built what he described as 
the strongest fortification in the United States, grow to nearly 
a million of people and become one of the most powerful 
states in the confederacy. The men who came here had 
earned the right to the enjoyment of liberty and peace, and 
they enjoyed the liberty and peace they had earned. The 
men who had helped win the war of the Revolution did not 
leave the churches and schools of New England to tread 
over again the thorny path from barbarism to civilization, 
or from despotism to self-government. When the appointed 
hour had come, and 

" God uncovered the land 
That he hid of old time in the west, 
As the sculptor uncovers the statue 
When he has wrought his best," 

then, and not till then, the man also was at hand. 

It is one of the most fortunate circumstances of our his- 
tory that the vote in the Continental Congress was substan. 
tially unanimous. Without the accompaniment of the 
Ordinance the Constitution of the United States itself would 
5 



34 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

have lost half its value. It was fitting that the whole 
couutr}' should share in the honor of that act which, in a 
later generation, was to determine the fate of the whole 
countr}'. 

We would not forget to-day the brave men and noble 
wdmen who represented Connecticut and Rhode Island and 
New Hampshire in the band of pioneers. Among them 
were Parsons, and Meigs, and Varnum, and Greene, and 
Devol, and True, and Barker, and the Gilmans. Connecti- 
cut made a little later her own special and important con- 
tribution to the settlement of Ohio. But Virginia and Mas- 
sachusetts have the right to claim and to receive a peculiar 
'share of the honor which belongs to this occasion. They 
may well clasp each other's hands anew as they survey the 
glory of their work. These two states — the two oldest of the 
sisterhood — the state which framed the first written constitu- 
tion, and the state whose founders framed the compact on 
the Mayflower; the state which produced Washington, and 
the state which summoned him to his high command; the 
state whose son drafted the Declaration of Independence, 
and the state which furnished its leading advocate on the 
floor; the mother of John Marshall and the mother of the 
President who appointed him ; the state which gave the gen- 
eral, and the state which furnished the largest number of 
soldiers to the Revolution ; the state which gave the terri- 
tory of the northwest, and the state which gave its first set- 
tlers — may well delight to remember that they share be- 
tween them the honor of the authorship of the Ordinance 
of 1787. When the reunited country shall erect its monu- 
ment at Marietta let it bear on one side the names of the 
founders of Ohio, on the other the names of Jefferson, and 
Richard Henry Lee, and Carrington, and Grayson, side by 
side with those of Nathan Dane, and Rufus King, and 
Manasseh Cutler, beneath the supreme nameof Washington. 
Representatives of Virginia and Massachusetts, themselves 
in some sense representatives of the two sections of the 



ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 35 

country which so lately stood against each other in arms, 
they will bear witness that the estrangements of four years 
have not obliterated the common and tender memories of 
two centuries. 

This, also, is one of the great events in the world's history 
which marks an advance of Liberty on to new ground wl«ch 
she has held. We would not undervalue military achieve- 
ments. Such a paradox, ridiculous anywhere, would be 
doubly unbecoming here. We stand by the graves of great 
soldiers of the war of Independence. This is the centennial 
of the State within whose borders were born Grant, and 
Sherman, and Sheridan, and Garfield. The men of the 
Revolution fought that the principles of the Ordinance of 
1787 might become living realities. The great captains of 
the later war fought that the compact might be kept and 
forever remain unalterable. The five states of the North- 
west sent nearly a million soldiers into the war for the 
Union, every one of them ready to die to maintain inviolate 
the fourth article, which declares: "The said territor}^ and 
the states which may be formed therein shall forever remain 
a part of this confederacy of the United States of America, 
subject to the articles of confederation and to such altera- 
tions therein as shall be constitutionally made, and to all 
the acts and ordinances of the United States in Congress 
assembled conformable thereto." These purposes inspired 
them when they drew their swords. They laid down their 
swords when these purposes were accomplished. 

It is this that makes the birthday of Ohio another birth- 
day of the nation itself. Forever honored be Marietta as 
another Plymouth. The Ordinance belongs with the Declara- 
tion of Independence and the Constitution. It is one of the 
three title deeds of American constitutional liberty. As the 
American youth for uncounted centuries shall visit the capi- 
tal of his country — strongest, richest, freest, happiest of the 
nations of the earth — from the storm}' coast of New Eng- 
land, from the luxuriant regions of the Gulf, from the lakes, 



36 ORATION OF GEORGE F. HOAR. 

from the prairie and the plain, from the Golden Gate, from 
far Alaska — he will admire the evidences of its grandeur 
and the monuments of its historic glory. He will find there 
rich libraries and vast museums, and great cabinets which 
show the product of that matchless inventive genius of Amer- 
ica", which has multiplied a thousand fold the wealth and 
comfort of human life. He will see the simple and modest 
portal through which the great line of the Republic's chief 
magistrates have passed at the call of their country to as- 
sume an honor surpassing that of emperors and kings, and 
through which they have returned, in obedience to her laws, 
to take their place again as equals in the ranks of their fel- 
low-citizens. He will stand by the matchless obelisk which, 
loftiest of human structures, is itself but the imperfect type 
of the loftiest of human characters. He will gaze upon the 
marble splendors of the Capitol, in whose chambers are 
enacted the statutes under which the people of a continent 
dwell together in peace, and the judgments are rendered 
which keep the forces of states and nation alike within their 
appointed bounds. He will look upon the records of great 
wars and the statues of great commanders. But, if he know 
his country's history, and consider wisely the sources of her 
glory, there is nothing in all these which will so stir his 
heart as two fading and time-soiled papers, whose characters 
were traced by the hand of the fathers a hundred years ago. 
They are the original records of the acts which devoted this 
nation forever to equality^ to education, to religion, and to 
liberty. One is the Declaration of Independence, the other 
the Ordinance of 1787. 



ORATION 



DELIVERED BY 



GEORGE F. HOAE, 



OF" TVlASSACIiTJSKT'TS, 



APRIL 7, 1888, 



THE CELEBRATION OF THE CENTENNIAL 



FOUNDING OF THE NORTHWEST 



MARIETTA, OHIO. 



WASHINGTON, D. C. : 

JUDD A nETWEILER, HKINTRRS. 

1S88. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



014 571 675 5 



